arms armies and anthropologists

People from countries that don’t have nuclear weapons are getting increasingly impatient with the United States, especially, but with all the nuclear powers, wondering when they’re going to get serious about honoring their obligations under Article 6. The United States was busy proposing sanctions against Iran, which was enriching uranium. There are innocent and less innocent reasons for enriching uranium. Iran is allowed under the terms of the treaty to enrich uranium for nuclear energy plants. But the United States was proposing sanctions on Iran for violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty, when I think any detached, objective observer would say that by far the largest violators of the treaty must have been the Russians and the Americans for sitting on these enormous stockpiles in spite of Article 6 commitments.

As an anthropologist, I find it particularly offensive when you talk to weapons scientists, or to other kinds of nuclear weapons professionals, that there’s a uniform assumption that Americans are the only people who can be uniquely trusted with nuclear weapons in a way that black and brown people, non-Christians in particular, cannot. You hear it said that only Americans and Europeans have the strength required of people to have nuclear weapons. This flies in the face of the evidence, since the United States is the only country ever to abuse weapons.


There was a big push by the Pentagon to recruit anthropologists. The project that particularly concerned me was called Human Terrain Teams. The idea is that every brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan would have attached to it a Human Terrain Team of several people, two of whom would be social scientists, preferably anthropologists. It would be their job to go out to local communities, talk to village leaders, collect intelligence about what was going on in a local terrain, and feed that back to military commanders. If you’re an anthropologist, this is a very troubling development. I hope that my colleagues in anthropology would be troubled by this even if they supported the wars. Because the prime directive in anthropology is that you do no harm to your human subjects, the people you study. I could have used what I learned about weapons scientists to try to do them in, to try and do great harm to the nuclear weapons labs and institutions. Although my politics are such that I don’t really support the nuclear weapons labs’ mission, I would never do that, because I think it would be a breach of anthropological ethics to study people and then use the knowledge you’ve learned from and about people against them, to subjugate and destroy their villages, to help them be occupied.



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